Product Owner – OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt)

The Role: Product Owner – OpenShift Virtualization (KubeVirt)

Location: Remote

Position Type: Contract Inside IR35

Remote work option Available: Remote

Job Description:

Role Summary (Executive Overview)

We are seeking a Product Owner to lead the strategy, roadmap, and delivery of OpenShift Virtualization capabilities built on KubeVirt, enabling enterprise-grade virtualization workloads to run natively on Kubernetes. This role owns the product vision and execution across platform engineering, infrastructure, security, networking, storage, and operations, ensuring we deliver a scalable, resilient, and compliant virtualization platform that meets demanding enterprise SLAs.

The ideal candidate combines strong product leadership with deep hands-on technical fluency in OpenShift/Kubernetes virtualization, including VM lifecycle, storage and network performance, security controls, observability, automation, and operational readiness.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy & Roadmap Leadership

• Define and drive the product vision for OpenShift Virtualization and associated services (VM provisioning, migration, backup/restore, DR, multi-tenancy, policy-driven governance).
• Own the multi-quarter roadmap, aligning capabilities to business outcomes such as VMware modernization, cost optimization, faster provisioning, and platform standardization.
• Establish product positioning for internal stakeholders and engineering teams: “why this”, “why now”, and “how success is measured”.

Delivery Ownership (Outcomes, Not Activity)

• Create and manage epics, features, user stories, and acceptance criteria with measurable outcomes and operational readiness baked in.
• Lead delivery ceremonies and governance: prioritization, backlog refinement, sprint planning, release readiness, and cross-team dependency management.
• Drive release strategy (phased adoption, pilot → scale patterns), ensuring platform stability and operational maturity before broad rollout.

Deep Technical Product Ownership (KubeVirt/OpenShift Virtualization)

• Provide product leadership across:
• VM lifecycle management (create/clone/snapshot, templates, cloud-init, day-2 operations).
• Migration approaches (e.g., rehost, refactor boundaries; integration with migration toolchains where applicable).
• Networking (Multus, SR-IOV, performance tuning, network policies, ingress/egress considerations).
• Storage (ODF/Ceph, CSI, performance tiers, snapshots/volume cloning, backup integration).
• Security and compliance (RBAC, SCC/PSA, image signing, secrets management, policy-as-code).
• Observability (metrics/logging/tracing; SLOs; capacity and performance baselining).
• Automation (GitOps with Argo CD, Ansible, CI/CD enablement for platform services).

Stakeholder Leadership & Executive Communication

• Partner with Infrastructure, App teams, Security, Risk/Compliance, Architecture, and Operations to align priorities and unblock delivery.
• Provide crisp executive-level communications: BLUF updates, risk trade-offs, and decision papers.
• Lead stakeholder expectations and drive governance for standards: tenancy model, quotas, performance tiers, service catalog, and support model.